Commercial College/University stations

[poledo]

It's a sweet situation, even if it's only 12-to-15 Saturdays each fall. In Gatorland, they're the most important days of the year!

I remember reading a newspaper article a few years back about the regents at Georgia Tech wanting to purchase a commercial FM license in Atlanta for the sole purpose of broadcasting Yellow Jackets' sports.  They had absolutely no plans on what would fill the rest of the air time on this imaginary station.  There was also something in the article suggesting they would be willing to sacrifice their non-commerical WREK if it could be moved and converted to a commercial station on 92.1

[amfmxm]

WUMS, Rebel Radio 92.1, is a commercial college radio station, at Ole Miss.

Owned by the Student Media Center, not the university. Just a little corporate separation to protect U of M.

If Rebel Radio pisses someone off, they can sue the Student Media Center, not Ole Miss.

[jh]

KBVU 97.5, Alta, IA is a commercial FM owned by Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, IA.  Student-run alternative format.  KAYL/KKIA in Storm Lake has an agreement allowing them to run some ballgames on KBVU.

[aaronread]

There was also something in the article suggesting they would be willing to sacrifice their non-commerical WREK if it could be moved and converted to a commercial station on 92.1

Probably the reporter doesn't understand the FCC allocations system.  It doesn't matter where you move a NCE license on the dial, it has to remain a NCE.  It can't just become a commercial station; commercial stations are created when someone petitions the FCC to add an allocation on a given frequency to a given community.  Assuming the petition meets the various requirements, an auction is set up and the allocation is auctioned off to the highest bidder.  That winner then has the right to request a CP for a new station that meets the requirements/limitations of the allocation, and assuming they do so within the alloted 36 months, they are granted a license to cover.

Similarly, as many have learned from the WFNX sale to Clear Channel, you cannot simply delete a commercial allocation once it has been created.  I suppose in theory the FCC can do that, but the license holder cannot.  They can only turn in/delete their LICENSE, at which point the allocation gets recycled and is auctioned off again during the next auction.

WREK, even if it could move out of the reserved band (87.9 - 91.9) it would still be a non-comm, although if it did move into the non-reserved band (92.1 to 107.9) then it would have to meet the minimum distance separations just like all the other commercial stations.  That's likely going to be very hard, if not impossible, to do in a major market like Atlanta.   IIRC, WOMR had problems trying to do it when they moved from 91.9 to 92.1 out in Provincetown (Cape Cod)...I think, and my memory's real fuzzy on this, that they convinced the FCC that any interference to any adjacent-channel commercial stations would be over water, and that moving would reduce the substantial co-channel interference they were getting from, and giving to, other 91.9 stations in Boston and Falmouth.

[amfmxm]

In today's world of clustered properties, there is nothing (aside from money) stopping Tech from buying a commercial FM and operating it commercially. And if they wanted to move the WREK calls to that commercial channel, the commission would grant the application.

Or if GT bought a commercial channel and wanted to operate it non-commercially, all they would need to do is apply for a change and it would be granted. Hell, there is nothing stopping any of us who operate commercial FM stations from operating non-commercially, at any time.

Just don't sell any commercials.

[DJKraze]

Part of the problem with WESU was of course the student turn around, things were pretty well handled for many years but along comes a time when most of those who knew what needed to be done all graduated at once and left nothing behind to help along the new board of directors. Things like filing a license renewal; I remember it stated clearly the license was up in April 1991 (I left 2 years before that), filing Taxes and renewing the non-profit corporation's paperwork : "T.T.T." (a non-student) was the guy doing that and when he retired, he was supposed to turn in all prior paperwork the station's business manager, I never heard that it happened and I was on the board at that time. Things were starting to fall apart right about the time the new Board started late 1989 and it is very evident that it never turned around until just before the station was relinquised to Bennet. The idea behind the station being turned over was that due to the University being a much more stable institution, it it could handle the expenses that the station was aparrently still recovering from (er, what happened to the 5 year payback of the $30,000 loan for the new transmitter guys? it WAS figured into the budget that way!) Additionally, part of the negotiations (which did cause some on campus protests) were that the station become NPR. I'm not sure if it was to be full-time or part time as it is now, I think I remember the station board at the time would not relinquish the station unless it were given about 50% of the broadcast day (an occupation?) Also, the University created a newly defined position of "General Manager" (with different duties than that of the old "Station Manager" position on the WBA Inc.) which is an actual paid staffer who is not a student in order to keep the station on a much firmer grounding regarding losing the whole ship the way it once did years ago. (of course the 9-days to vacate notice of the original offices/studios in the basement of Clark Hall into a smaller area did not help either, I imagine a good amount of historical paperwork corporate minutes and a ton of music were lost as well).

[DJKraze]

Also, some of the finer details about things that happened after I left might be a bit off or wrong because much of it was heard as either rumors or stories.

[aaronread]

DJKraze, my wife is a Wesleyan alum and I once applied for the same job that Ben Michael, the "new" professional GM, ultimately got.  Later I got to know Ben a little bit and he's a really nice guy; well-suited to the job in skills, temperament, and the fact that he's lived in Middletown most of his life.   Maybe all his life, come to think of it.

Anyways, I got pretty familiar with the whole snafu regarding the license transfer from the now-defunct independent entity to Wesleyan University proper.  Basically, the partial-LMA with WSHU (the NPR affiliate at Sacred Heart University) was the price Doug Bennett extracted in exchange for Wesleyan investing the time and money for better studio space, a full-time employee (Ben) and for keeping the FCC from immediately deleting the license.

Anyways, it's not full-time WSHU/NPR, just mornings to mid-afternoons and some weekends.  There's still quite a few hours in the day that belong to student and community volunteer DJ's.  Check the schedule here.

Wesleyan also paid for a professional spectrum consultant to analyze the surrounding spectrum in early 2007 and prepare an application to expand their signal ahead of the last big NCE filing window in October of that same year.  The CP was granted and, in a few years, built out...both expanding their reach into Hartford nicely and preventing a scad of competing co-channel applications from creeping in along the CT/MA border that would've knocked down WESU's reach northward considerably.  I know all this because I was that consultant.      The whole deal worked out fairly nicely for all involved.

I'm sure more that a few people at WESU were pissed about the "takeover" with WSHU but I think the results speak for themselves.  A: the license isn't gone.  B: they've got a bigger signal.  C: they're raising more fundraising dollars...from listeners...in their drives than they ever have before.  D: they've got a good structure in place to prevent the previous issues from ever happening again.

Objectively, I'd say it was a damn good thing Bennett was prez at the time; I think most University presidents would've either shrugged their shoulders and let the license die, or "saved" it only to immediately sell it and get rid of the problem while making a few bucks.   At least Bennett was savvy enough about radio to recognize its potential.

[shaund]

And a further clarification: WPRB and WBRU are not owned by their respective universities; like WHRB and WVBR, both stations are owned by independent companies whose boards are dominated by Princeton and Brown students.

Here's one that really is university-owned but operated entirely commercially: WPSE 1450 in Erie, PA is owned by the Penn State Behrend campus but runs satellite business talk.

And in Champaign-Urbana you have student-run WPGU, but that station's owned by the Daily Illini newspaper, not the U of I.

Yup. WPGU-FM, The Daily Illini, and a few other media outlets are under the umbrella of the Illini Media Company. Although we're currently financially independent, next year we will likely begin to receive funding from a student fee assessed to every student at the University (due to some bad decisions made by IMC management over the past several years).

[Signpost]

WFRD Dartmouth College, NH.